Removing out of date Scala web material

There are others I'm sure. These sites look amateurish are often way out of date. This is - I believe - a problem which is going to reduce adoption of scala and reinforce a general opinion that scala is an academic thing.

The online REPL, which is a great idea, just looks terrible when compared with http://tryruby.org/. I don't mean to denigrate the functionality - I'm just afraid that shallow types like me won't look much beyond the first impression that this stuff isn't for serious people doing serious things

Is this viewed as a problem by the Scala team? Can anything be done about the (presumably) 3rd-party sites like SBAZ? Am I being unduly harsh?

Re: Removing out of date Scala web material

I'm not a graphic designer, I'm afraid, so I can't offer solutions. But here are the problems with the site as it stands:

1. It looks official - it's called "simplyscala" and has the official logo right at the top of the page. Nothing about the site suggests that this is just an MSc project. I therefore assume it is some official EPFL online repl. The scala logo (which is rubbish anyway!) should be removed and it should be mad clear at the top of the page that this is a pet project

2. The Fonts - they are terrible (Use consolas?) get rid of the curly italics - they look like they are from a 1970s wedding invite

3. The colors - they are also terrible - beige?

4. Square edges

5. The l&f of the terminal - the fonts and general feel are again un-terminal like. The terminal should *be* a REPL and require continuation pipes if you go over a line

Re: Removing out of date Scala web material

To answer the question from the original post - Yes, I think you are being unduly harsh.

Granted, http://tryruby.org/ is more aesthetically appealing - it simply looks cuter. Since many people will judge a book by its cover it may be worth it to fix Simply Scala in that regard. It is also a nice idea to have an interactive tutorial where the instructions automatically flow forward as you follow them.

With that said, I think Simply Scala beats the crap out of tryruby overall. The issues with the latter are much worse (Still I very much appreciate the effort to create something like that):

* You can't paste into the REPL! This is incredibly annoying
* The tutorial is rather slow, and the tone is mildly irritating* When you get to chapter 5 or so and try execute "require 'popup' " as instructed, you get "You aren't allowed to run that command!"

... so the grass might look greener on the other side, but if you look closely...

>1. It looks official - it's called "simplyscala" and has the official
logo right at the top of the page. Nothing about the site suggests that
this is just an MSc project. I therefore assume it is some official EPFL
online repl. The >scala logo (which is rubbish anyway!) should be
removed and it should be mad clear at the top of the page that this is a
pet projecI think you're jumping to conclusions. Nothing suggests that it is official either, except perhaps the logo. But then again what's to say that only official Scala sites use the Scala logo. For comparison, here are the guidluines for the Python logo:

"Projects and companies that use Python are encouraged to incorporate the Python
logo on their websites, brochures, packaging, and elsewhere to indicate suitability
for use with Python or implementation in Python."

> 5. The l&f of the terminal - the fonts and general feel are again
un-terminal like. The terminal should *be* a REPL and require
continuation pipes if you go over a line

It depends on what people you are trying to reach. I find the UI on Simply Scala nicer as it is, and I suspect many other non-hardcore REPL users would agree.

Why on earth should it? This is for trying out Scala, so visible buttons are much more user friendly than having to figure out which command to invoke to reset it. Of course it wouldn't hurt if there was a command also, but if it is lacking this doesn't seem like a huge deal.

Re: Removing out of date Scala web material

People will not look closely - they will just see that the grass is beige and laugh at how amateurish it looks.

This would be great - unfortunately I (and I expect many others on these lists) might want a job - programming in scala - off these people in a few years' time.

Since the release of 2.8, I think (and I get the impression that this is going on behind the scenes) that EPFL needs to take the "next step" in order to get Scala into some serious big, established companies. Changing people's perceptions will go a long way toward achieving this. Simplyscala is the least bad of the examples I gave; sbaz and the scala wiki should just be unlinked, period. Two job postings from 2008? It makes scala look bad!